TheHitchhikers GuideTo The Galaxy

Earth Edition

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Hurrah! There are more of us. Like seemingly everyone else who has synaesthesia, I thought everyone experienced things in this way. Coincidentally, I also suffer migraines (caused by certain foods, particularly coffee. This I see as black and red and heavy, like car upholstery), I'm 'creative', and have a good memory for reciting things. I experience several different reactions: colours and tastes/smells have sounds, sounds have colours, and letters/words can have several attributes. I don't have much of a reaction to texture, except with highly tactile things like velvet. Even non-synaesthetes must have some idea of what it's like, i.e. with abstract concepts: depression is blue, anger is red etc. I still feel sorry for them, though.

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Yeah, i feel sorry for myself too. Worse. I'm jealous! I understood what he meant, when Garcia Marquez had one of his characters say "La sopa sabe a ventana" (The soup tastes of window) so i wonder if one can learn syneasthesia? At least a little bit?

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Yes you can: some people get it for a bit if they are ill, or if they take drugs or get a blow to the head: sometimes the link is 'obvious' to you, in some sort of instinctive way, as with your soup window, but what you're unlikely to get is the constant spontaneity of 'real' synaesthesia.

Cultivate it though, it's fun at times though at others it makes you feel distinctly pukey!

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Pastel? Aw, there goes my pretense at being the Scarlet Woman! Pastel then. Merengues? I like merengues, they look so innocent and are so uninhibited.

I read that Kandinsky used to hum a colour while mixing it. Colour and sound sometimes has a connection for me also, once an intensely orange streetlight against a blueblack sky produced a very sweet, high tone in the air. And Mozart's violin music to me is green. But that may be mere association, that some pieces smell of lilac most certainly is just that. So i do seem to have some sort of conception of the phenomenon, but it is very elusive, a bit like ghosts. Very tantalising. That is why i said i'm jealous of those who have it. I read somewhere that it's only 1 in 2000.

I wonder if synaestetics make similar connections, that is would a certain tone have the same colour for all?

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Nope...we synesthetes argue a lot. My brother and I both have it, but we only have 8 letters in common when it comes to their color. In the synesthesia community I'm in, I find it horribly frustrating that so many people seem to think A is red when it's so obviously a dull blue.

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That's what I thought, that the overlap might be only in the most obvious things. Strange btw that red seems such a vivid colur when it's really the one with the least wave energy and blue is considered a cool colour although it's wavelength is much shorter.

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Lots of us. I wonder if it is only as small a percentage as stated. My mom told me not to tell anyone when I was a child, as she thought my crisscross perceptions of sight/sound might be considered a type of insanity or drug abuse by others. Eventually we both learned that I was not alone nor terribly unusual.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."